Article excerpt

It's been less than a month since presidents Barack Obama and
Dmitry Medvedev dramatically pressed the "reset button" in US-
Russian relations, symbolically calling a halt to several years of
chilly ties.

But the roadblocks are already proliferating.

Three flashing amber lights in the past few days have signaled
profound differences between Moscow and Washington, and suggest that
warm smiles and handshakes at summit meetings might not be enough to
bring the two nations together. Although the emerging problems
aren't insurmountable, experts say that they may be a small
indication of things to come as Russian and US negotiators attempt
to find a common language after several years of shouting past each
other.

"I couldn't understand why some observers were recently talking
about a 'full reset' of relations between us; that's just asking to
be disappointed," says Dmitri Suslov, an expert with the independent
Council on Foreign and Defense Policies in Moscow. "I prefer to
speak about a pause in the growth of dangerous tendencies. Now,
after the honeymoon, we're coming back to hard realities."

Some recent "go slow" signs:

* Moscow this week angrily canceled one of its first scheduled
meetings with NATO, just weeks after the Western alliance decided at
a summit meeting to resume the dialogue that had been frozen in the
wake of Russia's war with neighboring Georgia last summer. The
reason, according to Moscow's ambassador to NATO, Dmitri Rogozin, is
the West's refusal to call off "provocative" 19-nation war games to
be held in eastern Georgia next month under the auspices of NATO's
Partnership for Peace.

"The recent cooling in our relations with NATO exposes clear
problems in our dialogue," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
said in a BBC interview Tuesday. "We do not understand this tendency
- still there, still not understood by us - to try to downplay the
norms of international law [and] the role of the UN Security
Council."

* In a speech in Helsinki, Finland, Monday, Mr. Medvedev
cautiously dissented from Mr. Obama's resounding goal of building a
nuclear weapons-free world, saying that Russia would rather
concentrate on solving immediate issues, such as cementing a new
strategic-weapons accord with the US, and would put several
conditions upon further cooperation with Washington in the crusade
to ban nuclear arms.

Those conditions would include, he said, banning weapons in
space, major efforts to cut conventional forces, and guarantees that
nuclear weapons would be destroyed rather than just stockpiled. He
also insisted that cuts in offensive weapons would be pointless if
the Obama administration went ahead with Pentagon plans to build a
globe-girdling missile-defense shield.

"We are very concerned about the prospects of a unilateral
deployment of antimissile systems . …

The NorthAtlanticTreatyOrganization: The Legal Status of Al Allied Headquarters to Import and Resell Duty-Free Merchandise within the Conflicts of Law HierarchyLong, Patricia Ann.
The George Washington International Law Review, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2002